I decided to suspend for one day my checking of the best elements performed by several skaters because someone brought 4A back to my attention. Does the code of points reward 4A little in relation to its difficulty? Yes. I said it years ago, I say it even now. Do I care how many 4A’s were performed in competition? No. I’m only interested in two, one attempted at a National Championship but landed on two feet and downgraded to a triple and one performed at the Olympic Games, not fully rotated and ended in a fall.

Why am I interested in them? Because it takes extraordinary courage to try a 4A at the Olympic Games, with a sprained ankle, knowing that the jump will almost certainly end in a fall, and that that fall will almost certainly mean farewell to a historic medal that at that time it was well within his reach, despite the hole in the ice. Because the skater who tried these two quadruple axel skates like no one has ever done before him, and why the man is even bigger than the skater, something many people still don’t understand.

All right, let’s go back a few decades, to the first figure skating competition I watched. I happened to see the conclusion of the women’s free skate of the 1989 World Championship, enjoyed it and watched the gala the next day. And in the gala I became a fan of, among others, Kurt Browning. Up until fairly recent years for me he was the best male skater ever, regardless the lack of an Olympic medal. Browning became famous with a jump, that quadruple toe loop landed at the 1988 World Championship which the ISU officially recognized as the first quadruple in figure skating history. There had been several attempts before, but officially this is the first successful one.

Browning has made very few 4T, never in combination. The first to perform a 4T in combination (first with a 2T and then with a 3T) was Elvis Stojko. Everyone has praised Stojko for his skills as a jumper, no one has ever praised him for the quality of his skating. The first 4S was performed by Timothy Goebel, nicknamed the Quad King for his jumping skills.

Quad King? I seem to have heard this title used recently too, yet Goebel stopped competing in 2006. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that the title is becoming a bit overused, and like things used too often, worthless .

Let’s go back in time to what Browning did a year before he charmed me with a very original gala. He landed a 4T, but in that World Championship he only finished sixth, with third free skate. Why? This is explained by Browning himself in his Forcing the Edge:

The judges gave me 5.7s and 5.8s for technical merit and 5.5s to 5.8s for artistic impression. This raised me to third spot in the free skate, behind Orser and Boitano, and meant that I would finish sixth overall.

His 5.7 and 5.8, the Technical Merit marks, are high marks but not so high. At the time there was no BV and GOE as now, it mattered in which position each judge had placed the skaters, and with that marks Browning was surpassed by both Orser and Boitano not only in the final score, but also in the two aspects, the Technical Merit and the Artistic Impression..

I’ve been asked: All right. You just cracked the Guinness Book of World Records. Didn’t that mean your marks should have been through the roof? What’s all this about 5.7s and 5.8s for technical merit? Let me answer this way. I remember once, at the NHK competition, watching Alexandr Fadeev at the top of his form. He didn’t look as if he was moving very fast, but he went by you like a shot. His footwork was extraordinary in every detail. He had good carriage and poise. Everything was clean and crisp. There was absolutely no sense of strain or apparent effort. He floated; he was truly masterful.
Those are things I didn’t have in 1988. Fine. I did a quad, but Orser and Boitano were better skaters. If you looked at Boitano’s spins and mine, there was no comparison in their quality. And our choreography was miles apart.
(p. 84)

The book is from 1991, Browning had won the last three World Championships, he had to participate in the Olympic Games for the second time. And he recognized that his quadruple was important, but that the others were complete skaters and had deserved to place ahead of him.

Fast forward now to a 2000 book written by a skater who retired when Browning was still a child.

If you do a quadruple-revolution jump today, someone else will do two (or four)quads tomorrow, so you’d better learn how to do more quads. Athletes such as Elvis Stojko, some of the Russian men, and even American Todd Eldredge may think that the way to improve as skaters is to add an additional rotation to a jump. If so, they could not be more mistaken.
As a result, they ensure themselves a less significant role in skating history than they would occupy developing other strengths. As soon as someone new comes along and adds yet another rotation, their accomplishments will fade. However, when the accomplishments are artistic and innovative, when a skater changes the medium of skating and moulds it into his personality as Gary Beacom and the quirky, humorous French skater Laurent Tobel have done, he guarantees himself skating immortality.

I stop a little in the quote. Tobel skated in competitions that, due to my commitments, I was unable to see, when I already loved figure skating, so he had no relevance in my being a sports enthusiast. As for Beacom… not too long after the 1989 World Championship I came across a show that was broadcast on television. I don’t remember who skated in that show, what I saw, with one exception: Gary Beacom. Beacom had retired in 1984, he didn’t win any major medals, but he struck me, because his program was different from everyone else’s, and he interpreted it very well. Beacom was fundamental, he told me that besides Browning there were other skaters worth following. With me he won his immortality, something that a simple jumper is not able to do, no matter how many quadruples he performs.

Let’s go back to the book, and to what was current at the time.

At the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, Tara Lipinski’s win in the ladies’ division was justified by the “experts” on the grounds that she had executed one more jump than Michelle Kwan, the beacon of light, the ultimate contemporary skater, and perhaps one of the ultimate skaters of all time. Such a rationale in itself is a crime. That should not be the reason why a skater wins an Olympic gold medal.
Although there have been much more egregious examples, that sort of thinking tells the skating audience at large that the quality of skating, the quality of jumping, choreography, musicality, and beauty mean absolutely nothing. The only important criterion is the number of jumps executed successfully – in direct contrast to the way skating was judged in the 1970s and 1980s, when figure skating built to the crescendo of popularity that it now threatens to fritter profligately away.
(p. 238)

Several years have passed. Which among Kwan and lipinski has had the biggest impact in figure skating? Which was able to captivate the fans? A difference jump is of no importance if the difference in skating skills or musicality is enormous. A jump, even a quadruple jump, is not everything, otherwise we would have to ask how Jason Brown managed to place fifth at the last World Championship when nine of the skaters who placed behind him (Tomono, Messing, Britschgi, Rizzo, Siao Him Fa, Litvintsev, Shaidorov, Yamamoto and Kvitelashvili) performed at least a quadruple with positive GOE.

And if anyone wonders why the public doesn’t care about the 4A made by the new Quad King, or why there are fewer and fewer spectators watching the competitions, perhaps they should reflect on these words. Which I didn’t write, but someone who knew figure skating a little better than me, Toller Cranston in When Hell Freezes Over.